I’ve always had trouble with giving a tax credit to a guy who buys $134,500 car
I hope you had a chance to read the recent Wall Street Journal column “Tesla Sales Fall to Zero in Hong Kong After Tax Break is Slashed,” because it validates what I’ve been saying for years. Why should a taxpayer who makes $50,000 a year help pay for a rich guy’s car?
The Hong Kong phenomena is a snapshot of the effects of tax credits. In March 2017 there were 2,935 Teslas registered in Hong Kong; then, in April 2017 there were zero. Why? Because the tax credits were eliminated. I’m sure the Hong Kong rich will continue to buy Teslas but maybe not quite as many as before.
If I were Elon Musk, I would not be sleeping well at night wondering whether or not Trump and the U.S. Congress just might do the same in the U.S. and eliminate tax credits for all electric vehicles.
There is no doubt in my mind that Elon Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur. Musk, a South African-born American Canadian, made his big bucks with PayPal and is now worth $14.3 billion, according to Wikipedia. But Musk is also a crony capitalist who has received $4.9 billion — and counting — from the government. Since the 2016 election, guess who’s trying to be Trump’s best buddy? You got it: Elon Musk.
Are electric cars, buses and trucks good for the environment? You bet they are. But asking the poor and middle class to subsidize them is criminal. When I’m talking about the poor and middle class, I’m not talking about just the poor and middle class in the U.S.; I’m talking about the poor and middle class in the whole wide world.
According to Unite for Sight, a worldwide nonprofit working for better eye health, “it costs $10 to feed a boy in Kenya’s refugee camp for three weeks. This is less than the cost of a lipstick in Manhattan.” There have been 540,000 electric vehicles sold so far in the America, which means that the feds have awarded $4,050,000,000 in tax credits. That same amount of money would have fed 23.8 million refugee kids for a whole year. And since there are only 22.5 million refugees worldwide — including adults — maybe the U.S. government could better spend the American taxpayers’ dollars.
I have breakfast every Saturday morning with a small group of my friends, one of which owns an electric car. One morning I happened to say, “I sure hope you appreciate my helping you to buy that car.“ Well, that didn’t go over too well with my attorney friend. But it gave me an idea and so now every time I’m in a parking lot, standing having a cigarette, when someone drives up in an electric vehicle I ask them how they like the electric vehicle that I helped them buy. This has led to many interesting conversations.
The media today are obsessed with Trump pulling out of the Paris climate accord. But what I am not hearing about is the more important happenings around the world. What’s the status of the genocide in Syria? How is tax reform coming along and are there any new cures for cancer? Thank goodness for the Internet and Google search, which keeps me informed. Reading a column by the American Press Institute I noted: “Overall, four in 10 Americans report that they only delved deeper into particular news beyond the headlines in the last week.” Kind of a sad state of affairs.
As Thomas Sowell said: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understands the difference.”
Robert Pembroke is the chairman of Pembroke’s Inc. and characterizes himself as being on a permanent sabbatical. He can be reached at pembroke894@gmail.com.